How the Philadelphia Flyers can ‘draft for need’ and win
Flyers NHL Draft: “Drafting for need” has become a cudgel to wield against hockey GMs. It posits the alternative as taking the “best player available,” and that just logically sounds like a horrible practice to engage in. Eschewing the best player available? What kind of war criminal would do that?
I think the truth is a bit more nuanced than that, though.
Hockey, as a sport, needs to do a better job of defining what a “team needs” is. Oftentimes, we use the positions ahead of a face-off to define the team’s needs.
If you don’t have any cool names at C, then you need a cool name at C. If you don’t have any cool names at defense… well, you know the rest.
But hockey is a free-flowing sport where the two biggest priorities are creating chaos for the opposing team and controlling the chaos that happens around you.
When you look at what a team needs, the best question to ask is: “What elements is this team missing? In which situations?”
How does a player play? How do their natural inclinations fit the needs and wants of the organization that drafts them? Questions like that, when answered properly, can be the difference between a bust and a star-level hit in a spot you didn’t expect.
Sure, some players transcend questions of fit and team demands. But it’s a lot–a lot–rarer than you think, and an elite talent in an environment catered to him will often have a greater impact than someone who blandly fits every system the same.
With that in mind, let’s answer these questions for the Flyers…
What do they need?
In-zone offense and an instinctive F3 player.
The Flyers at two Achilles heels at 5v5 this season, and they tied directly into each other. They simply couldn’t create offense when play was established in the offensive zone. They were a great transition team for the bulk of the season, but they were often one-and-done.
They got their rush chance, and the threat was over if they didn’t score.
Their main problem wasn’t recovering pucks on the forecheck. It was simply an inability to do something with the puck after it was recovered. The problem does tie back into the forecheck but in a very specific way.
In the offensive zone, the Flyers run their forecheck with a 2-1-2 formation. To put it simply, they send two forwards (F1 and F2) to pressure the puck directly. F1 will pressure the puck carrier, and either strip the puck or force a pass from one d-man to his partner. F2 will be covering the partner, and attempt to win the puck from there.
If the second D finds a way to make a play, then it’s your F3 who reads whether it’s a punt up the strong-side boards or a pass into the middle and it’s him who finds a way to intercept. He’s critical in recovering the puck, but it’s what they do after the puck is collected that this Flyers team lacks.
A lot of times, the Flyers did recover the puck. They have a lot of guys with size and foot speed who take clever angles to puck carriers. Their first layer is very effective. But once the puck is recovered, in this formation, you have two forwards who simply aren’t involved in the offensive play because they’re stuck on the wall behind the net.
If you have a player with the elite agility and puck control to get off of the wall while they’re personally controlling the puck, that alleviates the issue. The problem is that those players are unicorns, and they don’t come around every draft.
They got one last year in Matvei Michkov, but he’s currently fighting a war with known terrorist Roman Rotenberg and seems otherwise occupied for the next season… if not two.
Absent that, you need a team effort to remove the puck from the wall.
If you run through the tactical scenarios for long enough, the invariable conclusion is that the lynchpin of the entire operation is the lone player on the second layer of the 2-1-2, or the third forward (F3).
The F3 can provide an option for the two forwards who are otherwise stuck on the wall. With anticipation and smart positioning, he can arrive into position to get a pass off of the wall and threaten the middle of the ice himself.
If the two forwards are forced to send the puck up high to the third layer, or the two defensemen, then you see two possible scenarios.
The defensemen catch a puck with zero speed and defensive wingers closing in. Occasionally, Cam York will find a way to slip by his man and threaten by himself.
But you can see why you don’t want to rely solely on this. Even if you have Quinn Hughes or Cale Makar, you still need a better option than just telling one of them to “go torch someone.”
Jamie Drysdale should win even more of these engagements than York does with his superior explosiveness. So superior, in fact, that it was a noticeable gap even while Jamie was nursing a core injury. But even still? You don’t win consistently that way.
You need someone who can come up high and offer an option for those two defensemen that isn’t a low-percentage play and still provides danger. Unlike, say, a point shot into someone’s shin pads.
Someone who can collect that shorter, easier pass and then threaten defensive structures with downhill ability.
But it also takes effort and anticipation to read which one of these plays is happening as the F3. Is the forward going to make a pass to you? If so, get open for that. If not, walk up high to get open for your D.
When Sean Couturier was still physically capable of playing hockey for the first three months of the season, you saw the kind of impact he had as someone who has mastered the F3 position.
The Flyers need another.
Potential solutions: Konsta Helenius and Cole Eiserman
I wouldn’t call Konsta and Cole similar players, but there’s one trait that both have mastered to the nth degree. They’re the two most cerebral F3 players in the draft, with a possible exception granted to the surefire number 1 overall pick Macklin Celeberini.
Helenius is someone who could challenge for the smartest player in the draft overall. He reads every facet of the game exceptionally well, and for that reason, it’s when he has the time to use outlier pattern recognition as the F3 that his dangerousness is most apparent.
Konsta Helenius' (#2024NHLDraft) assist on Finland's fourth goal in yesterday's Slovakia game was a great example of his hockey sense and manipulative ability.
— Lassi Alanen (@lassialanen) April 29, 2024
A quick video breakdown of the play: pic.twitter.com/qyL604gIQ5
He’s more of a slick passer than a dangerous finisher once he has the puck, but he’s a highly manipulative player who understands how to open lanes for the passes he wants.
That includes the kind of royal road passes to set up slam dunk opportunities for teammates.
He may not have the sort of elite dynamism that makes the most difficult plays a realistic option for him when he has the puck. Earlier in his draft season, I wondered if this lack of explosion would hold him back.
Increasingly, I’m sure it won’t. Helenius is the kind of player who will kill NHL defenses through attrition by constantly making the right play and always repositioning to get the puck and do it again.
And though he doesn’t have elite dynamic qualities, you’d be wrong to say he isn’t dynamic at all. He can absolutely make high-level plays under heavy pressure. He’s one of the draft’s best at playing through contact.
He may have limitations, but he doesn’t have weaknesses. And he does have an elite tool: his mind.
Your mileage may vary, especially because Cayden Lindstrom has some pretty ridiculous tools, but I’m beginning to think Helenius is the most likely 1C of this draft not named Celeberini.
A team who desperately needs his kind of outlier celebreality on the second layer of a forecheck, but will surely get him a lot of puck touches just by being good at recovering the puck around him? It’s a perfect fit.
The right kind of “drafting for need.”
Cole Eiserman
If Helenius is tranquil water, Eiserman is volatile fire. Sometimes, he’ll even burn his team. But he’ll also burn the opposition indiscriminately and in an incalculable number of different ways.
It’s Eiserman’s shot that gets the attention of most people, but I’ve seen great shooters bully junior goalies before. And this isn’t just that. Eiserman isn’t collecting scoring chances at an unprecedented rate just because of his shot. He’s almost allergic to individual efforts. Eiserman collects scoring chances because he understands how to insert himself into scoring positions away from the puck.
Cole Eiserman’s scoring instincts make him the most dangerous F3 player in this draft.
Does COLE EISERMAN @USAHockeyNTDP break the All-Time Goal record? He's only 9 goals behind Cole Caufield's 126. #NHLDraft pic.twitter.com/kVmp1viFXA
— NHL Draft Prospects (@NHLDraftPros) March 27, 2024
From the moment his team’s F1 recovers the puck, Eiserman approaches the face-off dot and emerges as an easy passing option for F2. It’s high-level anticipation that makes his team easily connect 2 passes, and once he has the puck in a vaguely threatening area?
That’s when the shot takes over.
There’s an element of timing that it takes to open a passing lane as the receiver, and Eiserman naturally understands it. Another example of two quick touches from his teammates gets Eiserman walking into a downhill shooting opportunity, and he’s just too lethal in those conditions.
Cole Eiserman alone in the slot with the puck
The thing about what Eiserman’s doing? He’s blurring the lines for defenses. They were just battling for a puck only two seconds ago. They had to load up the strong side to support the battle.
But Eiserman was anticipating his team’s first touch the whole way. He played the situation like his team already had control, and then forced teams to switch immediately into their defensive zone coverage schemes.
Good luck with that.
That’s no easier to do at the NHL level, either. Defensive breakdowns from these instantaneous changes in possession happen all the time.
The playoffs are currently being defined by a team’s ability to generate quick-strike offense off of forced turnovers.
And in that? There’s nobody better than Eiserman in this draft.
As a D-1 player, there was some thought that he may be the next scheme-proof goal-scoring superstar. The guy who could go anywhere, into every spot, and give you goals at exorbitant volume.
For a variety of reasons, his stock has taken a hit. Talk of him challenging Celeberini for #1 or even going into the top 5 has all but faded.
But make no mistake, there is nobody better than Cole Eiserman at what he does. And what he does is more multi-faceted than you think.
At this stage, he’s unlikely to be the primary puck carrier on a rush. It’s not that much of a defect, especially if he’s playing with someone who’s capable of handling that burden.
He mitigates that defect by being equally adept at just downright driving the net with reckless abandon as the F2 who carves out space with pure aggression and will.
That’s a decidedly Flyers rush goal if I do say so myself!
But the dream still exists with Eiserman. The dream is that he ultimately reclaims the pre-DY prestige he once held. The idea is that he can do nearly everything for his team. For example? He’s a better handler than he gets credit for.
And when the decisions are on point, you get plays like this:
Of course, he somehow finds a way to score even when he’s setting up his teammates. This time, with another net drive off of the give-and-go he orchestrated.
You want “high-end talent,” right?
It’s hard to beat Eisenman’s top-end unless you win a lottery. And it just so happens you need what he’s bringing even on his worst days.
Mandatory Credit: (Rena Laverty/USA Hockey)
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